Here's a case of the fruit falling and rolling a long way from the tree.

Last Saturday, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Martin Luther King III spoke. He echoed his father's words from fifty years ago about people not being judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

In the words of MLK III:

"The task is not done, the journey is not complete," he said. "The vision preached by my father a half-century ago was that his four little children would no longer live in a nation where they would judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

To that end, I would say that Dr. King was wildly successful. Certainly, Dr. King's children -- post 1964 -- have, increasingly, lived free from the pernicious discrimination (legal and social) that his father -- and his father's generation -- knew all too well.

But then MLK III, in step with race industry propaganda, which is encouraged by the nation's white liberal power structure, said this:

"However, sadly, the tears of Trayvon Martin's mother and father remind us that, far too frequently, the color of one's skin remains a license to profile, to arrest and to even murder with no regard for the content of one's character," he said, calling for "stand your ground" self-defense laws to be repealed in states where they have been enacted.

MLK III isn't a naïf. He knows better about Trayvon Martin's "character," given the details that have surfaced about Martin. What Martin's intentions were that awful night he was shot and killed as he passed through George Zimmerman's neighborhood are at question. But that he pounced on Zimmerman and beat him isn't. That Zimmerman acted in self-defense is plain. When one is being beaten, one tends not to be overly concerned about the content of the assailant's character. In fact, one viscerally -- and painfully -- may assume that one's assailant is, oh, character-deficient.

But facts aren't permitted to stand in the way of race-pimping, which involves perpetually stoking anger and resentment among blacks, instilling fear of retribution among "nonblacks," playing on white guilt over decades-old racial wrongs committed by mostly dead whites, and exacting as much compensation as possible for supposed wrongs from the system; tribute, in other words, in unending handsome amounts, nice shares that find their ways into the pockets of the race pimps and their cadres.

To confirm his good standing with the race pimps, MLK III "also slammed the Supreme Court for having 'eviscerated' voting rights protections, calling for citizens to 'fight back boldly' to restore those rights." One assumes nonviolently.

MLK III knows this is baloney, too. The Supreme Court ruling on voting rights is simply a recognition of changed times. The south isn't the south of MLK III's boyhood -- or mine.

One might add that asking for legitimate IDs to ensure that persons are citizens and registered voters isn't discrimination, either. It's the rule of law, which civil societies abide. But the race pimps don't want America to be a civil society; they want Tammany Hall with a race-based cast writ large. Voter fraud is the aim.

As an aside, I was born and reared a southerner. I grew up in Atlanta's northeast suburbs, a mere twenty miles or so from where the Kings were raising Martin III and his siblings in south Atlanta. That was the 1960s.

As a young boy I witnessed the preciousness of Jim Crow throughout the south. My parents were northern transplants, Republicans, Roman Catholics, supportive of the civil rights movement, and admirers of Dr. King. I vividly recall my parents telling my brother and me that Dr. King's children could not go to the amusement park ("Funtown") that we enjoyed. It was a "whites only" venue then (defunct as of 1966). It made quite an impression on me as a boy, children being barred from an amusement park just because of skin color.

I would suggest to MLK III that he read more carefully his father's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

It's worth quoting at length this passage from the letter:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Today, segregation isn't legal or practiced in southern society or elsewhere in general society. One can, of course, find isolated instances of blacks being discriminated against. Isolated, that is, though the race pimps are eager to seize upon the extraordinary as proof that America never grew away from the bad-old-days prior to 1964.

It serves the race pimps' narrow interests, making America out to be a cesspool of racism. The ugly truth is that heinous segregation does exist in contemporary America, but it's nurtured by black leaders against their own people. Nurtured with cold calculation, and promoted by white liberals.

There's a dire need for a new emancipation movement -- freeing underclass blacks from the shackles fashioned by their own leaders and their white liberal allies. Grave injustices -- immoralities -- are being done to blacks by their own, and one may add, to the detriment of the broader culture. Go ask the citizens, white and black, of Duncan, Oklahoma, about that.

"Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority," wrote Dr. King in his Letter long ago.

I venture with real humility that were Dr. King alive today, he would direct those words to the men and women among his own people who oppress the poorest and least fortunate of his brothers and sisters, and who do so for the most cynical and venal of reasons.